Thursday, 31 January 2013

"......when well-established laws of chemistry and physics supported by high
levels of data and experimentation demonstrate that, barring the
supernatural or some new discovery yet to be made that would invalidate
many of our presently understood scientific laws and theories,
homeopathy has to be a sham......."

My last post has attracted an anonymous comment referring to a
response to the CMO by one Lionel Milgrom. I’ve read the response. Mr
Milgrom gives a number of references to support his argument that
homeopathy works and there is evidence to support that argument.
I then ploughed through the references only to find that there was no
such support. Many of the references are to articles that make no
mention of homeopathy, but are simply criticisms of conventional
medicine, as if that somehow were to make homeopathy respectable.
There are other articles looking at the concept of evidence based
medicine, but again simply criticising the scientific method is hardly
the same as endorsing the nonsense that is homeopathy.
The ultimate cherry pick is there in the list, a link to the British
Homeopathy Association website.
So he doesn’t actually present any evidence at all to support the
implausible notion that homeopathy is of any value.
Can it be true then than Mr Milgrom has distorted the facts,
misrepresented evidence, exaggerated, fabricated and invented? I don’t
have to look far to find evidence to answer that question. These two
articles by Ben Goldacre and Jack of Kent adequately sum the man up.

This page of one of my favorite sites also gives a nice accurate view.

Saturday, 12 January 2013

Yet another scam on the market, identical in modus operandi to those I have previously written about. If you read the terms and conditions it’s obvious that you will be taken for considerable sums of money.

What amazes me about these scams is that what they offer is so ludicrously implausible that it must be obvious to any normal person that the scammers are just insulting your intelligence. Previous products highlighted promised levels of weight loss only achievable by amputation but these latest products, “Lean Muscle X” and “PureCleanse” have a new claim, that they will “flush out the toxins in your body, melt away body fat and pack on tons of muscle”. In short that the product will give you a body like this.

And all from the comfort of your chair, without exercise, work or lifestyle changes. And all for just £69 per month that they will take from your credit card once you have placed your “free trial” order.

The ad slogan is “Get ripped in four weeks.” I think it should read “Get ripped off in four weeks”

Tuesday, 8 January 2013

I commented recently on some of the spam that's turning up in my comments. This is one such;

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Sunday, 6 January 2013

After some considerable time and no doubt great expense the report on Stafford hospital is published. Seems to me they could have saved a lot of time & expense by reading these. (1)(2)(3). Perhaps they did.

Friday, 4 January 2013

I could be wrong, but don’t I recall that the GMC promised that all doctors will have been written to by the end of December to tell them of their revalidation date? Well that deadline has passed and I have had nothing, how about the rest of you? I’m not too worried. The instant I hear about my date is when I deregister. But with the inevitable teething troubles, and the innate inertia and incompetence of the GMC it could be years before their promise of revalidation for everyone is fulfilled.

Wednesday, 2 January 2013

In my very first month, when I started this blog I twice bemoaned the gradual erosion of our clinical autonomy, the very basis of our profession as Consultants, and it is an issue that I have visited often since then. (1) (2) Inevitably as the politicians and managers have imposed control over our clinical conduct they have seen that, if all medicine is can be governed by protocol, you don’t really need doctors to do it, and our very purpose has been degraded.

I’m not by any means the only Blogger dismayed by this and both Dr No and the Witch Doctor have written excellent posts recently on the subject. So if the situation is obvious to bloggers it must be obvious to the rest of our colleagues, and from talking to them I know that that is the case, so why are we not doing anything about it. WD blames apathy but I think it’s a little more complicated than that.

I see Consultants as being divided broadly into two groups. The older generation who remember what true clinical autonomy was. They are mostly appalled by what has been done to the profession, but under the continual onslaught of demoralisation and demotivating from above their response is to cash in their pensions and fuck off. So disgusted are they with what has been done with our pay, pensions, working conditions, and revalidation that they are simply shaking the dust from their feet and walking without a backward glance. The NHS is prematurely losing it’s most experienced and valuable Consultants, the head and backbone of the profession.

Management are perfectly happy with this as it leaves them with the second group. Those far enough from retirement to fear for their continuing job security. This group has never known true clinical autonomy, but have grown up with the increasing control. They are more malleable and controllable than their older colleagues, and this is what management want.

But a controlled profession is no profession at all. The very concept of being a Consultant is cheapened and damaged. When management dictate clinical practice instead of leaving it to the professionals the inevitable result in terms of quality of care is obvious. But nobody seems to care any more.